Did Nabokov Really Hate Crime Fiction?

That's What He Claimed. But the Record Suggests Otherwise.

This is the column where the topic is, in part, about my own book. For in researching and writing The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World, which published this month, I made a point of noting what Vladimir Nabokov thought about crime fiction and real life crimes. And just as he would hide the story of Sally Horner, and its influence upon Lolita, in plain sight in the novel, so would he espouse some blunt, negative opinions about genre—even as he borrowed heavily, even faithfully, from it as only an astute reader could.

When Vladimir Nabokov disliked an author or genre he really, really wanted you to know of his dislike. Which is why, again and again, he went out of his way to criticize crime fiction. “There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch—mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor,” he told Playboy in 1964. To Time, five years later, Nabokov was even more critical: “With a very few exceptions, mystery fiction is a kind of collage combining more or less original riddles with conventional and mediocre artwork,” he declared in a 1969 Time interview. Those exceptions included Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe, whose work Nabokov read and reread between the ages of ten and fifteen, but otherwise—or so he said—he disdained the genre outright.

I found that the more Nabokov voiced a critical yet authoritative opinion, the more likely that in private, he had far more complicated feelings. Take his stance on Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose novels he insulted (one of the more charitable descriptions was of “melodramatic sentimentality”) in public on many occasions. And yet, those insults could only come from a man who had reread Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov and Notes From The Underground, the better to teach these works to his annual undergraduate class at Cornell. Nabokov may well have known more about Dostoevsky than the most slavish of Russian literature scholars. Plus, why waste time rereading works you hate? That’s why the Dostoevsky disdain always came off, to me, as classic “doth protesteth too much.”

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Another instance where Nabokov’s written opinion doesn’t quite track with his work is with respect to Agatha Christie. Nabokov exchanged many letters with his longtime friend-turned-foe, the literary critic Edmund Wilson. After Wilson upset mystery readers with the 1944 New Yorker essay, “Why Do People Read Detective Stories?” Nabokov wrote Wilson on October 11 of that year: “I liked very much your article on detective stories. Of course, Agatha is unreadable—but Sayers, whom you do not mention, writes well.” (Wilson took Nabokov’s advice, and so hated Sayers that the result was a second New Yorker essay, “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?”)

But as the Nabokov scholar Catherine Theimer Nepomnyashchy noted in a 2010 essay, Nabokov referenced Christie several times in his novels. The titular character of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), Nabokov’s first novel written in English, writes a novel of his own, The Prismatic Bezel, bearing a plot echoing And Then There Were None and Murder On the Orient Express. The narrator of Sebastian Knight, V., notes that Bezel conflates “a rollicking parody of the setting of a detective tale” with the modern novel’s “fashionable trick of grouping a medley of people in a limited space (a hotel, an island, a street),” which sure sounds as if Nabokov was trying to parody Christie.

But the parody contained a sting in its tail, as narrator V., is no fan of Bezel:

“But for Sebastian Knight, the merest trifle, as, say, the adopted method of a detective story, became a bloated and malodorous corpse. He did not mind in the least “penny dreadfuls” because he wasn’t concerned with ordinary morals; what annoyed him invariably was the second rate, not the third or N-th rate, because here, at the readable stage, the shamming began, and this was, in an artistic sense, immoral.”

Sebastian Knight published four years after Nabokov translated one of his Russian novels into English for the first time. Despair (originally published in 1934 as Otchayanie) is very much rooted in detective novel tropes, with doppelgangers, murders to collect insurance money, and seemingly perfect crimes that are anything but. The anti-hero, Hermann Karlovich, owes his existence to Nabokov’s adolescent reading of Edgar Allan Poe and Sherlock Holmes as it does to English-language cinema (and perhaps, with the insurance gambit, to James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, or even the real-life source material for Cain’s novel.)

Nabokov’s early crime genre influences are overtly referenced in Despair, when Hermann compares his quest for perfection in crime to an elegantly crafted mystery:

“Let us discuss crime, crime as an art; and card tricks. I am greatly worked up just at present. Oh, Conan Doyle! How marvelously you could have crowned your creation when your two heroes began boring you! What an opportunity, what a subject you missed! For you could have written one last tale concluding the whole Sherlock Holmes epic; one last episode beautifully setting off the rest; the murderer in that tale should have turned out to be not the one-legged bookkeeper, not the Chinaman Ching and not the woman in crimson, but the very chronicler of the crime stories, Dr. Watson himself—Watson, who, so to speak, knew what was Whatson. A staggering surprise for the reader.”

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Finally, Christie even shows up, albeit in a rather casual manner, in Lolita. The prison where Humbert Humbert is incarcerated, writing his “memoirs” and preparing to die, houses a library whose offerings include A Murder Is Announced. Nepomnyashchy explains why she believes Nabokov did, in fact, read the book while writing Lolita:

“In the simplest terms, A Murder Is Announced rests on a clever deception, a confusion of identities that, when unraveled at the end, reveals that the victim is in fact the murderer. What, then if we go past the sly joke of planting “a murder is announced” toward the beginning of Lolita, announcing that a murder will take place, and assume that Nabokov’s own plot, in which the identities of murderer and victim are confounded, resonates significantly with Christie’s?”

Sadly, there is no way to prove Nepomnyashchy’s theory, as Nabokov chose to discard his reading library even as he maintained a fairly scrupulous archive of his own works, and material related to them. But Nabokov’s criticism of Christie has the hallmark of someone who is well-acquainted with her work, the better to castigate it, rather than someone willfully ignorant. Nabokov was simply too clever to create a literary diss track without actually reading the work he prepared to diss. So it certainly was for Dostoevsky, and so it likely was for Christie.

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Nabokov, in his Cornell lecture “The Art of Literature and Commonsense,” espoused a particular philosophy about real-life crime:

“Criminals are usually people lacking imagination, for its development even on the poor lines of commonsense would have prevented them from doing evil by disclosing to their mental eye a woodcut depicting handcuffs; and creative imagination in its turn would have let them to seek an outlet in fiction and make the characters in their books do more thoroughly what they might themselves have bungled in real life. Lacking real imagination, they content themselves with such half-witted banalities as seeing themselves gloriously driving into Los Angeles in that swell stolen car with that swell golden girl who had helped to butcher its owner. True, this may become art when the writer’s pen connects the necessary currents, but, in itself, crime is the very triumph of triteness, and the more successful it is, the more idiotic it looks.”

That Nabokov understood the banality of true crime with such astuteness owes to his own careful attention to criminal behavior. Lolita, of course, bore this out with the parenthetical reference to Sally Horner’s 1948 kidnapping, as well as the longer paragraph, earlier in the same chapter, about the 1952 case of George Edward Grammer—though Nabokov, deliberately and as a multi-layered joke, misspells the murderer’s name as “G. Edward Grammar”—a man who tried to stage the murder of his wife as a car accident and was ultimately executed.

That Nabokov understood the banality of true crime with such astuteness owes to his own careful attention to criminal behavior.

Which is also why Nabokov’s interest, just over a month after Lolita’s American publication, in a third crime jumped out at me. As Vera told their close friend Morris Bishop when he telephoned with congratulations on the novel’s success, in the week of September 12, 1958, Vladimir had become obsessed with reading up on the stabbing murders of Dr. Melvin Nimer and his wife, Louise Jean, in their Staten Island home.

What fascinated Nabokov was that police initially treated their eight-year-old son, Melvin Jr., as a suspect. Even though strips of cloth found on the boy’s bed suggested he had been restrained while his parents were murdered, Melvin’s “unnaturally calm demeanor” raised red flags in the investigators’ minds, as did an apparent confession elicited during a mental health evaluation, and the lack of forced entry into the Nimer home.

But the presumed case against the little boy soon fell apart. No physical evidence linked Melvin to his parents’ murders. And police learned that Dr. Nimer had left a set of spare keys at the hospital where he worked, which had vanished—thus answering the “lack of forced entry” question. The case remains unsolved to this day, but there were police detectives still claiming as recently as 2007 that Melvin Nimer was the best suspect in the case.

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Finally, it’s worth wondering whether Nabokov ever expressed a positive opinion about a crime novel not written by Poe or Conan Doyle. And it turns out, as Curtis Evans noted in his blogThe Passing Tramp in 2015, the author did, in a letter to Edmund Wilson that pre-dated the New Yorker essays by a year: “I was lying on my bed groaning…yearning for a good detective story—and at that very moment [A] Taste for Honey sailed in…Mary [McCarthy] was right, I enjoyed it hugely—though the entomological part is of course all wrong (in one passage [author H. F. Heard] confuses the Purple Emperor, a butterfly, with the Emperor moth). But it is very nicely written. Did Mary see the point of the detective’s name at the very end? I did.”

That Nabokov, in 1943, was “yearning for a good detective story” suggested that he had, in fact, read and enjoyed detective stories in the past, and that they might give him comfort when in the grips of illness, like the “intercostal neuralgia” that would famously plague him on repeated occasions over the course of his life. And so it stands to reason that, contrary to his repeated public disdain, crime, whether in fiction or in real life, was the genre Nabokov gravitated to most of all, to bend it to his will in the pursuit of his great art.

Sarah Weinman, a CrimeReads contributing editor and columnist, is the editor of Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s (Library of America) and Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense. Her first nonfiction book, The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World, will be published this fall.